


no way out but through

by hollimichele



Category: Captain America (2011), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: M/M, i have a lot of Bucky feelings, present day, winter soldier - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-24
Updated: 2012-04-24
Packaged: 2017-11-04 05:37:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/390349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hollimichele/pseuds/hollimichele
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve never sees it coming.</p>
            </blockquote>





	no way out but through

Steve doesn’t see it coming, is the thing.

It’s not that he should have expected it: or not expected this thing, this specific wrecking ball to come crashing into his life. But he should have known there would be something, that he’d had it too good for too long. Steve is starting to think he shouldn’t ever stop expecting the world to be pulled out from underneath his feet.

He’d been settling in, was the funny thing. Settling into 2012, into the Avengers, into a new life that was a world and a half away from anything he could have wanted or expected before. He’d stopped having nightmares, mostly, stopped falling asleep every night with a pencil in his hand and a half-finished sketch of Peggy in his lap. He let Tony take him out drinking. He was getting to like Bruce’s sly, dry sense of humor. He never pulled his punches, training with Natasha.

But then the assassin came to New York.

He heard about it first at the morning SHIELD briefing, when Fury slapped a gruesome eight-by-twelve down on the conference table. The man in the photo had a hole in his temple, and that was the part that was easy to look at.

The photo made Natasha purse her lips a little, which for Natasha was a lot of expression. “He’s Russian,” she told the table, “and he has-- had-- enough of the best security that he shouldn’t be dead. Whoever this was, he’s good enough that we don’t want him in the city.”

It didn’t seem like such a big thing, to Steve. Not that a murder should be overlooked, ever, but they’d just got done with Loki, and he was still thinking in terms of world-ending threats. An assassin-- even a very good assassin-- wasn’t really something the Avengers were needed for. Surely the NYPD, or failing that, the FBI would want to handle it themselves?

But it had been handed up to SHIELD, because the dead man was just that important, and other important men were nervous. Tony scoffed at it-- “Bunch of rich old farts, scared the boogeyman’s coming for them--” but he took it a little more seriously after the second assassination, and stopped complaining at all after the third. He’d known the third man-- they’d golfed for charity together, once, apparently, and Tony hadn’t liked him but he didn’t want him dead.

The assassin was still smoke in the wind, even then, no real links between the victims and not even the ghost of a trace of a clue. Steve wasn’t a cop, wasn’t good for much but standing outside the crime scenes with Thor and making people feel reassured that the Avengers were handling things while Clint and Natasha and Bruce did the real work. That was why he was looking over the heads of the thronged reporters, trying not to make eye contact with anyone who might ask him a question, when he saw the figure on the opposite roof.

There should have been SHIELD agents swarming every building for a three-block radius, but whoever was on that roof didn’t move like a SHIELD agent. “Excuse me,” Steve said to the reporters, starting to push through the crowd, trying to figure out why alarm bells were going off in his brain--

A bullet dinged off his helmet. People shrieked around him, threw themselves flat on the ground, took off running. Thor hefted his hammer, and looked up. Steve picked up speed, another bullet cracking off his breastplate, and when he got into the building across the street he bolted for the emergency stairs.

The building wasn’t so tall-- only ten stories or so-- and Steve had time to wonder while he was running up the steps. Was this their ghost? Why would he hang around after a hit, and what was he doing taking potshots at Captain America? Thus far he’d been the model of professionalism, leaving nothing but the bodies behind him. What was different now?

Steve stopped at the door to the roof, thoughts still racing. He didn’t know what he was walking into, not really. He should have waited for backup, for Thor and Clint and the others. He didn’t know what had made him run like that, what it was about the figure on the roof that had set him off. He still didn’t know, still was breathing too fast, heart pounding in a way that had nothing to do with the stairs.

He unholstered his service weapon and stepped through the doorway, covering the rooftop in a quick sweep of his eyes. There was the sniper’s tripod, still set up on the far side of the roof. There were a quartet of SHIELD agents, hopefully just unconscious. And there was a man in loose black clothes, crouched at the edge of the roof, his head in his hands.

Steve stepped across the rooftop quickly, gun trained on the man in black. “Put your hands above your head,” he said, and then tried to remember the Russian Natasha was trying to teach him. The first two victims had been Russian, and the third was trying to buy a Russian company the week he died.

When he repeated himself, this time in halting Russian, the man looked up at him. He was wearing a black domino mask, and his long hair fell around his face, but he looked familiar. He looked like-- Steve didn’t let himself finish that thought.

“Your Russian’s lousy,” the man said, in an accent that was pure Brooklyn, and Steve nearly dropped his gun.

“Take off your mask,” he ordered the man in black.

“Nyet,” the man said.

“Do it,” Steve said, “or I’ll-- I’ll--”

The man in black made a placating gesture-- _okay, okay_ \-- and reached up to peel off the mask. He pushed his tangled hair back from his face and looked Steve in the eye.

Steve lowered his gun.

The man in black-- _Bucky_ \-- lunged at him. He moved like a snake, almost too fast for anyone without superhuman reflexes to follow, and he nearly had Steve’s gun in the first three seconds. The gloved hand that gripped Steve’s wrist felt like a vise. Steve was too suprised to do anything but twist out of Bucky’s grasp and step back, stunned, shaky for reasons that had nothing to do with the fight. “What’s _wrong_ with you?” he demanded, even his voice unsteady. “Shooting at me like that, and those killings-- was that _you_? How are you even _here_?”

Bucky only smirked at him, a sneering curl of the lip that looked all wrong on his familiar face, and lunged again. This time Steve had to fight back for real, a little, though he couldn’t find it in himself to take the offensive, couldn’t throw a punch at that face.

“So this is the Captain America I’ve heard so much about,” Bucky said, trying to swipe Steve’s feet out from under him. “Huh. Not so impressive, when I get a good look at you.”

“ _Bucky,_ ” Steve said. It was all he could say.

And that made Bucky’s face change, made some strange expression come over it. He muttered something in Russian, said “I’m not-- not supposed to--”

“What?” Steve said. “What’s _wrong_ with you? Don’t you even know me?”

But whatever had made Bucky look almost like himself again, it passed over his face like a cloud, and when it was gone he redoubled his assault. Steve wasn’t fighting back, not properly, and he was too distracted to mount a proper defense, too busy searching Bucky’s face for some hint of recognition to care overmuch about the gun in his hand. So he wasn’t surprised, exactly, when it was suddenly in Bucky’s hand instead of his own, and he was looking down the barrel.

That was when Thor hit Bucky with a flying tackle out of nowhere, and punched him in the head. Most people only needed one punch to the head from Thor for a good solid half-day of unconsciousness; Bucky just reeled, and it took a second punch to put him down.

“My friend, you are a better fighter than that,” Thor said, offering Steve a hand up. “What ails you?”

“It’s not me, exactly,” Steve said, and stared down at his best friend’s face. The whole world had been pulled out from under him again. He should have seen it coming.

Back at SHIELD headquarters, Steve had a hard time focusing. There were meetings and debriefings and a disappointed lecture from Fury-- “I wouldn’t have expected to need to tell you not to run off on your own, Rogers, that’s what we have Tony for--” but really, all Steve cared about was the unconscious man in the holding cell downstairs. He was sitting at a conference table, listening to Thor and Fury, but his head was twenty floors down. He hadn’t even explained himself yet. He didn’t know how could, without sounding crazy.

He tuned back in when Natasha said “--just a rumor, really. A legend. But they called him the Winter Soldier.”

Steve looked at her. She held his gaze for a second before her eyes dropped, and she continued. “They say he could blend in as well as any American, and they used him for covert ops in the States. He was kept in cryogenic suspension between missions; he never aged. He had his memory wiped after every op, so there would be nothing in his head but what his handlers put there. He was supposed to be the perfect operative, the perfect assassin. But I thought he was a ghost story, until now.”

The man in the holding cell had nothing in his pockets. His fingerprints, at least on his right hand, didn’t match any records, though SHIELD wouldn’t have had Bucky Barnes’ prints on file. His left hand-- his left hand was made of metal, like the rest of his arm, and left no prints. His face, his familiar face, didn’t match any current record in the SHIELD database. But it wouldn’t be a current record, would it?

It was Thor who asked the question, finally, his voice surprisingly gentle. “You acted as if you knew him, Steven,” he says. “Who is he?”

Steve stared at his boots. It felt like a betrayal to even say it, but he got the words out, after a long pause. “Bucky Barnes,” he said. “He looks like Bucky Barnes.”

This was met with silence, an endless moment of his teammates looking at each other, and Steve supposed, thinking the same thing: _Well, Captain America’s lost it. Now what?_

But when someone finally spoke, it was Tony, saying, “Jesus. No wonder. You really think it’s him?”

“He’s got Bucky’s face,” Steve said. “I know that. But he hasn’t aged, and he didn’t know me. I don’t know what that means, if he’s this Winter Soldier character.”

“If he is,” Natasha said, “there might not be anything left of your friend. The Winter Soldier is meant to be nothing but his mission. He was the best work the Red Room ever did.”

Steve shakes his head. “I don’t believe that,” he said. “If he’s really Bucky, he’ll remember who is he is eventually. He’ll remember me.”

But he didn’t, and he didn’t, and he didn’t. He woke up, and Steve went to see him with his heart in his mouth, hoping for anything, some hint of recognition, but there was nothing. The man in the holding cell was dangerous, and volatile, and impossible to interact with safely-- he attacked everyone who came near him, and had to be sedated before anyone could get a good look at his artificial arm. He spoke Russian, mostly, and lapsed into English occasionally, and had nothing but contempt for Steve.

“You’re not so tough,” he said through three-inch-thick bulletproof glass, sneering at Steve with a bravado that was almost familiar enough to hurt. “I could have taken you.”

“Why did you even try, anyway?” Steve asked. “I wasn’t your target, was I? You’d already carried out your orders. You could have gotten clean away.”

The Winter Soldier just shrugged at that, something flickering in his face. “I wanted-- I wanted to see,” he said, but that was the last question he answered that day, and for days after.

Steve took to coming down to the holding cell late at night, when no one but the third-shift guard and a skeleton staff were even in the building. The Winter Soldier slept soundly, and his eyelids didn’t even twitch. He didn’t seem to dream.

The rest of the team didn’t like that Steve was spending so much time with the Winter Soldier, he knew. Bruce tried to talk to him about feelings, which never went very well, and Tony kept coming up with the kind of social events he usually avoided like the plague, and tried to get Steve to come along. Thor was more direct about it, at least-- turned up at Steve’s apartment in Brooklyn with a case of Asgardian mead hefted on one shoulder, and an offer to help drink Steve’s sorrows away.

That, he agreed to. It was the only thing on Earth he knew of that could get him drunk, and it was worth the demigod-sized hangover.

Late that night, well into the fourth bottle, he looked at Thor pleadingly and said, “What would you do? If it were you? Would you keep trying?”

Thor frowned into his mug. “I never stopped trying, with my brother,” he said. “I still have not. I would not expect less of you, my friend.”

“I just--” Steve slurred a little, trying to find the words, “I just wish there was something I could do to get him back. Really back. All of him. Something I could punch, for preference.”

That got a laugh out of Thor. “If there were a quest I could go on, a monster I could slay, to have my brother returned to me, I would be gone in a moment,” he said. “If we were in Asgard, I would take you with me to the roots of the world-tree, where the valiant may have a wish granted. Or-- oh,” he said, and stopped, a wondering look on his face.

“What?” Steve asked, feeling stupidly hopeful.

“We may not need to go to Asgard to have a wish granted,” Thor said. “We may have all we need right here. I must call Jane,” he said, and fumbled out his cell phone in its heavy-duty case.

Steve could hear a little of the conversation before Thor let himself out onto the balcony-- “Honey, are you drunk?” he heard Jane ask tinnily-- but after that he had to watch through the glass as Thor gestured expansively and argued some sort of case into the phone. He was smiling when he came back in, anyway, which had to be good sign.

Thor wouldn’t explain-- “Tomorrow, I will make all clear--” but he poured a toast, and when he said “To brothers, and brothers in arms,” Steve threw his glass back and let himself hope.

In the morning, once the hangover had subsided to a dull roar in his ears, Thor took Steve to Jane Foster’s lab, which sprawled across half a dozen rooms on one of the highest floors of SHIELD headquarters. Jane’s lab was full of busy technicians and whiteboards covered in incomprehensible scribble, and her assistant, Darcy, who Steve knew mostly as the girl Clint made excuses to come visit and make eyes at, greeted Thor with a hug.

“You really think this will work?” Jane asked Thor, looking skeptical.

“I have only my hopes, dearest Jane,” Thor said, “but from what I know of the tesseract, it may.”

“The tesseract?” Steve asked, a memory sparking. “That’s the Red Skull’s power source, yeah? The thing he used for all his super-weapons. But it was lost, when I--” He didn’t like talking about that, all that much. The rest of the team knew enough about it.

But Thor only nodded. “But it was found, long before you were,” he said. “And it has been a puzzle to your Midgard scientists ever since, has it not?”

“Has it ever,” said Jane. “You shed a little bit of light on it, but I know it’s not your area of expertise. We still can’t use it in any meaningful way.”

“What good would it do for Bucky?” Steve asked. “The last thing we need is for him to get his hands on the kind of weapons Schmidt had.”

“It wouldn’t work that way for him,” said Jane. “As far as we can tell, it didn’t work that way for anyone but Schmidt.”

“He wanted power, so it gave him power unending,” said Thor. “Not everyone wants power.”

“The tesseract gives off different readings depending on who’s looking at it,” said Jane. “It changes with the user. With the user’s moods, sometimes, even.”

“But it takes a mighty will to make its power manifest,” said Thor. “And a great desire, one that surpasses all else in the user’s mind. I think you might be able to command it, Steven.”

Steve tried to make sense of what Thor and Jane were saying. “You’re telling me the tesseract can-- what, grant wishes? That if I just want it badly enough, it’ll make Bucky remember himself?”

“It’s worth a try,” Jane said. “The only time we’ve gotten it to do anything was on Take Your Daughter to Work day last year. One of our techs has a seven-year-old, and she really, really, _really_ wanted a pony.”

“It was a cute pony,” piped up Darcy.

Steve was having one of those moments that, thankfully, had been getting fewer and farther between, a moment where the utter strangeness of his life got away from him a little bit, and he felt like a skinny kid from Brooklyn in way over his head. It passed, the way it always did, and Steve set his shoulders back and said, “Okay. When are we doing this?”

“It’ll take weeks to get proper permission to take the tesseract out of storage,” Jane said. “But I’ll do my best to fast-track it.”

“Weeks?” Steve asked, his heart falling like a stone. “I don’t know if we have weeks. Fury doesn’t like having--” he faltered on the name-- “the Winter Soldier here; he’s going to have him transferred out to a secure site soon.”

“Hm,” said Jane, and her mouth set into a thoughtful line. “I’ll see what I can do, okay? Maybe call in some favors, and if that doesn’t work I’ll just take the thing and say I’m sorry later.”

“Ah, my dear impetuous Jane,” said Thor, and the two of them swept off together, presumably to try to get the tesseract and whisper sweet nothings in each others’ ears.

That left Steve with Darcy, who popped her gum and looked up at him through her eyelashes. “So this Bucky guy,” she began, and arched an eyebrow. “He must be pretty important, huh?”

“To me? Yeah,” Steve said. “About as important as someone can get. Getting him back, really back, would be-- would be--” He tried to find the right words, but they weren’t there.

Darcy’s expression softened, and she patted Steve’s arm. “I get it,” she said. “I hope it works.”

A few days later, and they’d made no progress at all. The tesseract was kept behind the tightest security at SHIELD, even higher than Jane’s clearance level, and she was, she said, beginning to think she was being stonewalled. As for the Winter Soldier, it would be a matter of days before he was transferred out of headquarters, made to disappear into some high-security black box of a prison where Steve would never see him again. Steve was starting to feel panicked, antsy, feeling the phantom of an iron band around his lungs like his asthma had come back every time he thought of Bucky-- of the Winter Soldier.

The day they were supposed to move him, everything went to hell.

Steve was in Jane’s lab, listening to her and Darcy bicker companionably about movies he had never heard of, when every alarm in the building went off at once. He could hardly hear his cell phone ringing above the din, but when he answered it Fury was hollering in his ear that he had better get down to the containment cells ASAP, and if he didn’t make a better showing against the Winter Soldier this time he, Fury, would have Steve’s head on a damned platter, if there was anything left of it.

“The Winter Soldier’s loose in the building,” he said, standing up. Darcy stopped talking, and Jane went pale-- Thor had showed her the files. “I want you two and your staff to barricade yourselves in here after I leave. Jane, where are they keeping the tesseract?”

“Steve, you’re not going to-- at a time like this?”

“Best time for it,” he said briskly, shoving back any sign of fear or doubt. “Maybe I can get him to remember himself before he hurts anyone else. Where is it, Jane?”

“In secure storage on the fourteenth floor,” she said, “but I don’t think they’ll let you have it--”

“Let me worry about that,” Steve said.

When he got to the fourteenth floor, the guards on duty were looking very nervous. They relaxed a little at the sight of him, and one of them even snapped off a brisk salute. “Gentlemen,” Steve said, “Director Fury has asked me to neutralize the Winter Soldier. You have an item in your care which I believe will allow me to do that. I’m going to need you to get it out for me.” He wasn’t actually lying, was the thing: every word he said was true. It’s just that they weren’t, as such, directly related in the way that he was presenting them to be.

It was a little embarrassing, the way the guards jumped to work. Steve would have felt a bit guilty, but he had Bucky to think about.

They gave him the tesseract in an insulated box, and Steve recalled Jane’s warning. “Don’t touch it bare-handed,” she’d said, back in the lab, and Steve had pictured the way the Red Skull dissolved into nothing, and shivered.

Then he headed for the armory.

Bucky wouldn’t have wanted to face a building full of SHIELD agents unarmed, and it turned out the Winter Soldier was no different. Steve joined Clint and Tony at the armory doors, already blown half-off their hinges; Tony was wearing the gloves to his suit and Clint had a set of throwing knives. “Bastard caught us off-guard,” Clint told Steve, “I was on my way out of the range, and only had these on me.”

“What’s he got, then?” Steve asked, and Tony made a face.

“He hasn’t cracked the thumbprint lock on the weapons lockers yet, but there were enough guns left out that he’s not going to run out of ammo for a while. I say we gas the whole floor, but Coulson swears we don’t have the capability. I think he’s lying, there’s no way a couple of bastards as paranoid as him and Fury wouldn’t have built gassing capability into the building--”

“Well, that option’s off the table for now,” Steve said. “Let’s try Plan B.”

“What’s Plan B?” Clint asked, looking skeptical.

“This is,” said Steve. He hefted the box holding the tesseract in one arm, his shield on the other, and threw himself through the open doors. Bullets rattled off his shield as soon as he got into the Winter Soldier’s line of fire, but that didn’t bother him much; he just ducked and rolled past him, and got some cover behind a bank of lockers.

There was a pause. Steve could see the Winter Soldier reflected in a mirror above the lockers; he was reloading, and looked uncertain. “You again,” he said, in English. “I don’t know what you keep coming back for.”

“I have to keep trying,” Steve said, and opened the box. Blue-white light poured out. Steve looked into the light and thought, _I want him to remember._

“What is that?” The Winter Soldier asked. “What are you doing?”

 _Remember,_ Steve thought. _You’re Bucky Barnes. You’re my best friend. I would do anything,_ anything _to have you back, to have the person who knows me best by my side again. Please. Remember._

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the Winter Soldier said, and Steve realized that he’d been speaking aloud. “Whoever you think I am, I’m not.”

“You are,” Steve said, and stepped out from behind the lockers, holding the box full of light out in front of him like an offering. The Winter Soldier backed away, his gun forgotten. “I know you are. I remember you. You made me ride the Cyclone ‘til I got sick, and you’re not as good a dancer as you think you are, and you always, always had my back in a fight. You’re Bucky Barnes. Somewhere inside you, you know it.”

The Winter Soldier shook his head, still backing up. “I’m not. You’re crazy.”

Steve reached into the insulated box, bare-handed, and held up the tesseract. It sent tingles up his arm, but it didn’t hurt, not really. The lights flickered. “Bucky. Remember who you are. _Please._ ”

Steve realized he could feel the tesseract in his head, a cool alien intelligence, wordless but aware. It wanted to know if he was sure. “I’ve never been more sure of anything,” he said. “You’re Bucky Barnes. You’re my best friend in the world. _I want you to remember who you are._ ”

The tesseract flared brighter, suddenly, and Steve’s arm went numb. It clattered to the floor, and as it fell the Winter Soldier doubled over like he’d taken a punch to the gut. He made a sound, a wordless moan, and Steve needed to be by his side right that minute. He ran towards him, the tesseract forgotten on the floor, and reached out to Bucky.

He was curled up on the floor, clutching at his head. Steve slowed as he approached, trying to be cautious and failing. “Bucky?” he asked, reaching out to touch his shoulder.

Bucky raised his head, and it was _him_ behind his eyes, not the Winter Soldier’s blank bravado, and Steve sagged with relief. “Steve?” Bucky asked. “What did you do?”

“I guess I wanted you back bad enough,” Steve said, and smiled at his friend.

But that wasn’t the right thing to say, maybe, because Bucky curled back into a ball, and let out a ragged sound that wasn’t quite a sob. “You shouldn’t have,” he said. “God, you shouldn’t have. I remember all of it, Steve. Everything they took away. I don’t want it, I don’t, I don’t...” He trailed off. Steve sat down next to his friend, and tried to put his arm around him, and realized he hadn’t known what he was doing at all.

Steve was dimly aware of Clint, standing in the open doorway, and Tony reaching out with his gloved hands to pick up the tesseract. “Steve?” Clint asked, looking worried, “What did you do?”

“Just... just give us a minute, okay?” Steve said, and turned his attention back to Bucky. Who flinched away from his touch like it burned, and wouldn’t look him in the eye, and whose good hand shook when he pushed Steve away.

“Get away,” he said, and shoved Steve back again.

“Bucky?” Steve said, and tried to step back towards him. Bucky’s eyes were red-rimmed, and his mouth was set. He looked, Steve thought, like nothing so much as how he’d looked when Steve found him in the Hydra factory, all those years ago.

“Get. _Away._ ” Bucky said again, and swung blindly at him. Suddenly Thor was between them, holding Steve back, and Natasha was behind Bucky with a syringe in her hand. She jabbed him in the neck with it, and his eyes rolled up in his head as he slumped to the floor..

“What are you doing? Leave him alone!” Steve demanded, but Thor shook his head.

“I’m not sure if that is wise, Steven.”

“You made him remember,” said Natasha, and when did the rest of the team get here? None of them looked happy. “If he remembers everything, then he remembers _everything._ Good and bad. I don’t think he’s safe to be around.”

“I can’t-- I can’t leave him alone,” Steve protested. “He needs me.”

“He needs every shrink we’ve got on staff, if Widow’s right,” said Tony, scowling up at him. “You wished on the monkey’s paw, you idiot. You’re supposed to read the fine print before you do that.”

Steve hadn’t really thought of the tesseract that way, hadn’t thought of anything but getting Bucky back, and he twisted to watch as Bucky was swarmed with heavily-armed agents and medics. Leaving him meant that Bucky was alone with his memories, and that-- that wasn’t okay. He shouldn’t have to bear that.

But the rest of the team was insistent that Steve wasn’t safe with him, and Fury backed them up-- after a solid half-hour’s chewing-out over using the tesseract without permission and taking it within striking range of someone as dangerous as the Winter Soldier. “Bucky wouldn’t hurt me,” Steve insisted, but Fury only glared at him.

“The first thing he tried to do was _shoot you in the head,_ ” he growled. “Now you’ve inflicted seventy years’ worth of unpleasant memories on him. You are not to be in a room with him ‘til he’s been cleared, if he ever is. Am I understood?”

“Fine,” Steve snapped, and he went to get Darcy to help him find a cot that he could set up in the observation room.

Bucky was awake and crouched in the corner of his holding cell when Steve came back into the observation room, his head in his hands. “Bucky?” Steve called out to him, but he didn’t answer, didn’t make any sign that he’d heard. “Bucky, I’m not... I’m not going anywhere, okay? I’ll be right here.” There was still no response. Steve sighed, and settled in. He was prepared to wait, as long as it took. When Bucky was ready, he’d be there.

But he wasn’t ready, not for a long time. For the first few days, he wouldn’t even talk; he spent most of his time curled in a ball in the corner, and the little sleep he got was interrupted with nightmares. Steve could hardly stand being on the other side of the glass, trying to snap Bucky out of them and half the time failing, and what little response he got was more than anyone else managed to elicit. Bucky ignored the various SHIELD psychiatrists and doctors who came to evaluate him; most of them, after trying and failing to get anything from Bucky, turned their focus to Steve.

“You haven’t left the building in days, Captain Rogers. It’s not healthy for you to be down here all the time,” one of them told him. “I understand you’re worried about your friend--”

“Look,” Steve said, “If the team needs me, I’ll be there. I’m keeping up with training, I’m at all the briefings I need to be at, and I’m not going to miss any missions. What I do with my personal time is none of anyone’s business, and I choose to be here. I’m not the guy you need to worry about right now.”

The rest of the team was good about it, and Steve was pretty sure they’d organized some kind of rota to come and visit him. Darcy kept coming by with a pack of cards, and Tony paid visits at what seemed like totally random hours. Bucky, in his holding cell, ignored them all completely, like he ignored everyone, even Steve most of the time.

The first few weeks passed like that, Bucky unresponsive, Steve keeping his anxious vigil. It was late, one night, but Steve was still awake, sketching idly while Bucky twitched and murmured in his sleep. His voice rose in pitch, still too slurred for Steve to make out the individual words and half in Russian besides, until he woke himself up with a shout, staring around him blindly, his chest heaving.

“Bucky. Bucky! You were dreaming. It’s all right,” Steve said.

“Where are we?” Bucky asked him.

“We’re in New York. At SHIELD headquarters,” Steve added. It was the longest conversation they’d had since Bucky had remembered.

“At-- what year is it?”

“It’s 2012.”

“Oh.” Bucky sounded a little disappointed. “The war-- the war’s over?”

“For a while now, yeah.”

“Okay.” There was a pause. “I remember-- my head’s too full of stuff, Steve. I can’t get it sorted out.”

“That’s okay,” Steve said, trying to sound soothing. “Don’t worry about it. We’re gonna see what we can do about that.”

Bucky nodded, taking that in. Then he asked, “Did I try to shoot you?”

Steve almost laughed at that. “Little bit, yeah.”

“Oh. I’m sorry. I just-- I saw you, and it was like I knew there was something that should have been there, some memory, I could feel it like a lost tooth, and it made me so _angry._ ” Steve sat very still, letting Bucky talk. It was the most he’d said at once, in Steve’s hearing, since-- since before the train, maybe. “Steve?”

“Yeah, buddy?”

“I think I’m gonna lose it, if I don’t get out of here soon. Lose it more than I have, anyway.”

It took another two weeks, after that, of shrinks and doctors and Steve pleading his case to Fury, but at the end of it Steve’s keycard worked on the door to the holding cell again, and when he let himself in Bucky was sitting slouched on his cot, and if he was still a little hollow around the eyes, at least his eyes were clear.

“God, Bucky--” Steve said, and he threw his arms around his best friend in the world and hung on tight for a long, long moment. Bucky hesitated a little before he put his own arms up, but soon enough they were hanging on to each other like two friends who hadn’t seen each other for seventy years. Steve buried his face in the crook of Bucky’s neck and breathed in the too-familiar smell of his best friend after a few days without showering, and tried not to notice the way that Bucky’s shoulders shook. Bucky returned the courtesy, anyway, and when they finally peeled themselves apart Fury was leaning in the doorway.

“You’re responsible for him, Captain,” Fury said, looking Bucky over in a way that made it clear he was distinctly unimpressed. But Fury looked at everyone like that, and Steve couldn’t really care less about Fury just at the moment.

“Right, fine, absolutely, sir,” he said, and grinned at Bucky. “Let’s go home.”

A SHIELD driver took them to Brooklyn, because no one really trusted Bucky on the subway yet-- “Myself included,” he pointed out-- and dropped them off in front of Steve’s brownstone.

“I have the top floor, and there’s a gym in the basement,” he told Bucky. “You’ll like it. It gets a lot of light, and there’s a balcony--”

“Buddy, it’s not a cot or the ground or the deep freeze, it could be rat-infested for all I care,” Bucky told him as they went up the stairs. But he relaxed, once he got inside, after he’d prowled around for a few minutes checking all the lines of sight and the exit routes.

Steve had a cubbyhole of a spare bedroom that he’d fixed up for Bucky, room for a bed and a dresser and not much else. There was a framed picture of the Commandos on the wall, and an old transistor radio on top of the dresser. Steve didn’t have a television, but he’d let Tony set him up a sound system in the living room; he didn’t really get how it worked, just knew that Tony promised him hot and cold running jazz and a fool-proof interface.

The apartment was furnished by some SHIELD agent with surprisingly good taste, and for all that he didn’t spend much time there Steve had found that it suited him. It was fitted out in a mix of vintage reproductions and genuine old things, and he’d brought home some art and knicknacks from antique stores and flea markets, to make it feel a little bit more lived-in.

“Have you got beer?” was Bucky’s first question once he was done giving the place the once-over, and that was enough to get a laugh out of Steve. He did, thankfully, and the two of them sat out on the balcony with their bottles, studying the changed skyline. “God, that’s good,” Bucky said, draining his beer. “You know, I don’t think I’ve had anything decent to drink in fifty years? I had a hit in a bar in DC in fify-six, and I bought a round to put the mark at ease--” he stopped, stuttering to a halt, and his face furrowed up as the rest of the memory hit him.

“Bucky?” Steve asked, unsure of what to say. He put a hand out, touched Bucky’s shoulder. “If you want to talk about it--”

“I really, really don’t,” Bucky said, shaking his head as if to shake the memory away. “But thanks.”

That night, Steve woke up one, two, three times to shake Bucky awake out of nightmares, and only once did Bucky go for his throat with his metal hand. Steve counted it as improvement, and didn’t say anything to him about it in the morning. He didn’t need that much sleep, not really.

Bucky got better in fits and starts, it seemed. He still spent most of his time at SHIELD headquarters, alternating between debriefings on his time as the WInter Soldier and therapy sessions, and Steve could tell he was spending more time dwelling on bad memories than he wanted to be. He came back to the Brooklyn brownstone each night tense and unhappy-looking, only unwinding after a few hours out on the balcony or curled up on Steve’s couch.

One night, it took five solid minutes to wake Bucky up out of a nightmare, and when his eyes finally opened they were blank and unseeing at first. Once his breathing slowed down and he knew where he was, Steve made to go back to his own room, but Bucky reached out with his good hand, grasping for Steve’s wrist. “No,” he said. “Stay, would you? I’ll sleep better, and you can just shove me awake if I have another one.”

“I--yeah,” Steve said, and then added, “or you could come into my room, I’ve got a bigger bed.”

So they padded into the other bedroom and Bucky lay down; Steve picked up a half-full sketchpad and tried to catch the curve of Bucky’s shoulder under the covers, in the half-light, before his own eyes grew heavy. This time, Bucky didn’t need waking up again; they both slept through the night.

There wasn’t anything strange about it, not really; they’d shared a bed plenty of times as kids, even as teenagers, and for the first three months they’d lived together as adults before they could afford a second bed. And during the war you didn’t get picky about who you were sharing a bedroll with, as long as they were warm: Steve had slept with his arm slung around Bucky as often as he had with Dum-Dum or Jacques or Jim.

Well. Maybe a little oftener.

The thing Steve hadn’t been thinking about, the thing there hadn’t been room for in his head these last awful-wonderful weeks, began to creep back into his awareness as Bucky got better. It didn’t help that Bucky was almost pathologically averse to wearing proper clothes when he was in the apartment, wandering around in in his shorts most of the time, maybe pants if Steve was lucky, and when he wasn’t being debriefed or psychoanalyzed he didn’t have much to do but putter around the apartment and work out. He’d lost weight and muscle tone in his weeks in the holding cell, and he threw himself into regaining them with an unfamiliar intensity.

Steve found himself staring at Bucky at odd moments, watching the muscles in his back shift as he did push-ups or wrenched himself into one of the yoga contortions he was learning from Bruce. He woke up some mornings from vague but wonderful dreams about skin and heat, in which Bucky had two flesh-and-blood hands and there were no shadows in his eyes. He wasn’t going to say anything about it-- he’d been not saying anything about it since 1935, he wasn’t about to start now-- but it was almost reassuring, somehow, to have that old wordless yearning back, to have Bucky beside him to yearn for.

It wasn’t as easy to yearn in 2012 as it was in 1942, though; back then, people had the decency to pretend they didn’t notice; and there had been Peggy, too, Peggy who he could look at openly, could think about maybe dancing with someday. In 2012, when people noticed you yearning, they said something about it.

“So you and Bucky,” Darcy began, at lunch in the SHIELD commissary. It was them and Jane and Thor and Clint; Tony had wandered by and stolen an apple off Steve’s tray earlier and Bruce was probably drinking wheatgrass smoothies in his lab. Nobody ever saw Natasha eat. Rumor had it she and Coulson plugged into the same battery recharger on their lunch breaks.

“So me and Bucky what?” Steve asked, aware that all the attention at the table was suddenly focused on him.

“So he’s doing better, right?” Darcy said. “You’ve been coming up for air, a little.”

“Yeah, he’s doing a lot better, I think,” Steve said. “It’s a real relief. Having him back-- having him be himself again-- I can’t begin to tell you.”

“And perhaps soon he will fight alongside us!” Thor put in. “As befits a warrior of his stature.”

“Right, that,” Darcy said, nodding slowly. “But I was wondering more how the two of you were doing. Together.”

Steve shrugged, and tried to keep a flush from creeping onto his face. “We’re doing okay. It’s not so different from when we lived together before the war, except for-- well. Everything that’s different.”

Darcy nodded, her eyebrows creeping up towards her hairline, and exchanged a significant look with Jane. Clint looked from Jane to Darcy, frowning, and then his eyebrows went up too. Thor, bless him, didn’t seem to pick up on any of it; but then, being Thor, if he’d had any suspicions he’d have come right out and voiced his hearty approval, since apparently in Asgard they didn’t have any hang-ups about things like that.

Mercifully, that was when Bucky jogged up in SHIELD-issue sweats and said, “Rogers, my plan for today involves running in circles around Central Park until my legs give out. You in?”

“Absolutely,” said Steve, and made a hasty exit.

On their third loop around the park, Bucky pushed his sweaty hair back out of his eyes and said, “Fury wants me for an agent.”

“That-- that’s fantastic, Bucky,” Steve said, beaming at him. “It’ll be great to have you on the team. They all like you, I know-- well, Natasha’s a little hard to read, and I’m not that sure she likes anyone, but--”

“Not for the team,” Bucky said, cutting him off. “Fury doesn’t think I’m Avenger material. Black ops, on the other hand, should suit me down to the ground.”

Steve couldn’t quite voice what it was about Bucky’s tone that made a thread of unease uncoil in his gut. He sounded-- resigned, maybe. Like he’d almost hoped for something better, but he thought he was getting what he deserved. “You don’t have to do that,” he said. “Not if you don’t want to. You spent God knows how long doing that when you didn’t want to, and Fury’s got no right to ask it of you.”

“C’mon, Steve,” Bucky said, “You really think I’d fit in with all the shiny superheroes? What happens when the press asks for an origin story? Think they’d like to see my hit count?”

“That’s none of their damned business,” Steve said, and found himself growing angry at the imagined press, at Fury, at everyone who thought Bucky belonged in the shadows. “You gave your life for your country. You did as much as I did, and more.”

Bucky gave him a wondering look. “You really mean that, don’t you?”

“Of course I do. I wouldn’t say it otherwise. If you want to be an Avenger, you’re going to be an Avenger. Um-- you do want to, right?”

Bucky laughed at that, and said, “If you need me to watch your six, I’ll be there,” and Steve smiled back at him, determined to make things right with Fury.

That was the week it turned out Tony had been holing himself up in his lab this last month or so building Bucky a new arm, one with a real-looking removable simskin sleeve to cover up the metal. Bucky decided he wanted to commemorate the occasion in “a real goddamned bar, Steve, one with a lot of beers on tap and music and, God willing, some women,” and Thor and Tony both had thought that was a fantastic idea.

So that was how the whole crew ended up in Steve’s local, which had more microbrews than Steve could count and the kind of decor that made him feel at home, and which made Tony crow that he’d never known Steve liked hipster bars, whatever that meant. It was a good night even if Steve couldn’t get drunk himself, everyone loose and happy, the bar getting more crowded as the night went on, Bucky in short sleeves with a pint in his hand, trying to teach Darcy La Marseilleaise.

But there came a moment when the waitress dropped a glass mug, and though Bucky wasn’t the only one to flinch-- they all of them had combat reflexes-- he flinched hardest, and Steve saw him look around the crowded bar and go a little white around the mouth. Steve was at his side in a moment, murmuring “I could use a little air, how about you?”

Outside in the cool night air, Bucky sagged against the building for a moment in relief, but once the moment was up he rounded on Steve and said “I don’t need a baby-sitter anymore, Steve, jesus, I’m all right. Or I’m getting there, anyway,” he said, with a wave of his realistic new left arm that encompassed the vast strangeness of their lives.

“I know you don’t. I know,” Steve said, and added, as honest as he could be, “But I don’t know if I can help but worry.”

Bucky scowled at him. “Well, you can cut it out, already. I don’t need you watching me every minute of the day. You wouldn’t believe the shit Tony says about us.”

Of course Tony would, Steve realized, because Tony had no filter between his mouth and his brain, and he’d been spending hours alone with Bucky fitting the new arm. “What-- what’s he been saying?”

Bucky shrugged. “A lot of stupid crap. Don’t worry about it.”

“I can’t not worry about it, Bucky. And I can’t not worry about you.”

“Didn’t that used to be my job? Worrying about you?” Bucky looked down at the ground, a bitter twist to his mouth. “And then you went and got yourself shot full of Vita-Rays, and now I’m the one that needs a nursemaid.”

Steve tried to shrug it off. “It’s no more than you ever did for me,” he tried to say, but Bucky only laughed at that.

“I got you chicken soup from the corner deli and beat up a few guys. I had your back, but you never needed as much looking after as all that.”

“I dunno. Felt like I got into a lot more trouble than that, sometimes,” Steve said. “And you were always there when I did.”

Bucky shook his head. “We could stand here all night, comparing box scores,” he said, “but I don’t think we’re gonna agree. Let’s go back in and make our excuses, I’m beat.”

They got back to the apartment late that night, and Bucky made a beeline for Steve’s bedroom door. “You coming, Rogers?” he called behind him when Steve hesitated, and he was already asleep by the time Steve turned out the light. Steve lay awake in the dark a long time, looking at the back of Bucky’s neck in the dim light that filtered in through the curtains, listening to him twitch and murmur in his sleep.

The universe had been kind to Steve, these last couple of months, in terms of world-ending threats: he’d been able to focus on Bucky without having to worry about the fate of the universe. But that was too good to last. It was inevitable that something big and bad would turn up in New York, and when it did Steve spent three straight days awake with his shield on his arm, fighting an endless stream of nightmarish-looking creatures that poured out of a rip in the sky, until Thor and Jane figured out how to close it for good. When a SHIELD backup team swarmed in to take care of the last of the creatures, Steve swayed a little on his feet and sat down, hard, and then went to sleep and didn’t wake up for a day and a half.

When he came to, he was in a recovery room back at headquarters, and Bucky was sitting in a chair beside him, watching his face.

“You okay?” Steve croaked.

“Pretty sure I should be asking you that, yeah?” Bucky said.

“I’m fine. Just tired, is all. What’d I miss?”

“The cleanup, mostly. I don’t-- I couldn’t-- Fury wouldn’t let me in the fight,” Bucky said, his shoulders tense, and added, “Said I wasn’t cleared yet. So I just had to sit here, and watch you all--”

“Hey,” Steve said, and sat up, reaching out to Bucky. “If you want on the team, we’ll get you on the team. Since when do you want to go running into danger, though?”

“I don’t,” Bucky said. “Never have. You’re the idiot who throws himself on grenades. I’m just running after you.”

Steve had gotten pretty good at not letting it show on his face, these last eighty years or so, but he slipped up then, and Bucky saw too much. He saw it reflected in Bucky's own face, the wondering change in his expression, the dawning light of realization, and he said "Bucky--" too quickly, prepared to laugh it off.

Bucky didn't laugh, though, or turn away. He said "Oh," and then "Jesus, Rogers," and then he leaned in and pressed a swift kiss to Steve's mouth.

Steve gaped at him, a little, and then he threw caution to the wind and pulled Bucky in for another, deeper kiss.

Bucky made a soft noise into Steve mouth, and sucked on his tongue a little, which was amazing, and then he pulled back and said, “Okay, we’re getting you out of here, and then we’re going home and-- and--”

“Yeah?” Steve asked. “And what?”

“I don’t know, but I think it’s gonna be pretty goddamn great,” Bucky said.

Steve was aware that he was grinning like a loon through most of medical, though he managed to get it more or less under control by the time they pronounced him fit to leave the building. But then he walked out into the hallway, and Bucky was slouched there against the wall, and he found that he couldn’t stop smiling again. Bucky’s mouth twitched, too, a sly little grin, and the two of them fell into step together, shoulders brushing as they made their way down to street level.

The trip to Brooklyn felt like it took a lifetime, but every time Steve started to feel unsure he looked at Bucky and saw the promise gleaming in his eyes. Finally, finally, they were climbing the stairs to their apartment, and as soon as the door was closed behind them Bucky was shoving Steve against the door and kissing his way up Steve’s throat.

Steve tipped his head back and tried not to moan too loud, and when Bucky swiped his tongue against the hinge of Steve’s jaw he failed entirely. He ducked his head to kiss Bucky again, sucked at his tongue and bit his bottom lip, and somehow they had moved from the door to the couch and Bucky was undoing the button on Steve’s trousers. Steve wasn’t entirely sure how that had happened, wasn’t really tracking the sequence of events all that well, but he wasn’t about to complain.

The pulled apart for a moment, catching their breath, and Bucky’s hands wandered their way up Steve’s sides, under his shirt. “God,” he said, “Why didn’t I ever do this before?”

“I was wondering the same thing,” Steve said. “I was-- scared, I guess. That you wouldn’t feel the way I did.”

“Well, that was stupid of you,” Bucky said. “and stupid of me-- god, look at you.”

There was the thing he hadn’t been thinking about, the unspoken worry that had plagued his romantic life since 1942. “But you knew me before-- all this,” Steve said. “You’re the only one who did.”

Bucky’s eyes went soft, and he leaned in to kiss Steve again. “Haven’t forgotten a minute of it,” he said, “even if it’s not all in the right order anymore-- and one thing I can tell you, Rogers, is that you haven’t changed a bit, except on the outside.”

“Still as stupid as I ever was?” Steve asked, quirking up the corner of his mouth.

“You got it in one,” Bucky said, and he put his hand down Steve’s pants.

Steve gasped and hitched his hips up. Bucky’s grip felt amazing, calloused and perfect, and he scrabbled at the zip on Bucky’s trousers when he wasn’t too busy moaning into Bucky’s mouth. The hand that cupped the back of Steve’s head, raking through his hair, didn’t feel like metal at all.

Steve got a hand on Bucky’s cock. Bucky hissed through his teeth and his grip on Steve faltered, tightened and then sped up again. The two of them pushed each other on, faster, harder, and Steve bit at the straining tendon in Bucky’s throat as he came. Bucky went over the edge a minute later with a moan, and as their breathing slowed down again Steve kissed Bucky one more time, long and deep. “We should have done that eighty years ago,” he said.

Bucky only grinned and put his hands on Steve’s shoulders, pulled him in for another kiss. It was Steve’s dream come to life, Bucky with his eyes clear of shadows and his hands flesh-and-blood to look at them. It was more complicated than that, Steve knew, and it always would be-- but that night, they slept tangled together in Steve’s big bed, undisturbed by nightmares.

At the SHIELD briefing in the morning, Fury flipped a manila folder at Steve as he was leaving. “Pass that on to Barnes to sign,” he said, “and I won’t bother to tell you not to read it.”

Steve had been distracted, all through the meeting, mostly because Tony had been shooting him sideways looks and chuckling to himself, but also with thoughts of the night before. But the file folder got his attention. He headed down to the cafeteria, where Bucky was sitting with Bruce and Thor and Darcy, gesturing animatedly with a French fry as he explained something to them.

“So, Agent Barnes,” Steve said, “are you ready to be an Avenger?”

Bucky blinked up at him for a long moment, gaping a little. “Are you pulling my leg, Rogers?”

“Nope. Just got the paperwork from Fury. Your record’s clear, and all you need to do is sign on the dotted line.”

“You’re kidding, right? They’ve still got me seeing shrinks three days a week.”

“That is not, actually, an impediment to being cleared for field duty,” Bruce noted mildly. “Believe me, I know.”

A slow smile spread across Bucky’s face, and without looking away from Steve, he asked, “Who’s got a pen?”

Darcy produced one with a flourish, and Bucky signed in his neat copperplate, _James Buchanan Barnes_ , and handed the papers back to Steve.

“So I’m on the team?” he asked, and looked up through his eyelashes at Steve, a look that said Steve was in for a good time when they got home that night.

“So you’re on the team,” Steve said, and slung his arm around his best friend in the world.

**Author's Note:**

> So this is some fairly gratuitous hurt/comfort, and I own that. Sometimes you just need to ride the Id Vortex, you know? And Bucky suffers awful pretty.
> 
> Thanks to ellen_fremedon for beta, and srevans and neotoma for handholding.


End file.
